


One Week Notice

by WonderAss



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: A Hearty Dollop Of, Alternate Canon, Body Horror, Choking, Cunnilingus, Denial of Feelings, Dirty Talk, Erotic Horror, F/M, Face-Fucking, Feelings Realization, M/M, Marking, Masturbation, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mild Painplay, Multi, Mystery, Possessive Behavior, Psychological Horror, Rough Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Shameless Smut, Size Kink, Slow Burn, Verbal Humiliation, Voyeurism, horror porn, pinning, then...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-27 23:14:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16229297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WonderAss/pseuds/WonderAss
Summary: They kept the journalist and the alien confined alone. Studied, experimented on and reduced to little more than a number for the greater good.The ends shouldn't justify the means, but Viola has to shelve misguided compassion for the sake of the world and its people. That's exactly what Carlton Drake told her and that's exactly what she did, right until the very last week.





	One Week Notice

"CliffsNotes won't help us. Just give me every little detail you remember."

He asked about Carlton Drake. He asked about her missing co-workers. Sooner or later he was going to get to her: the missing link in a story too strange for both parties. Matthew is about as ordinary and everyday as she is, unique position as an intelligence agent in a virtually unknown branch of the government notwithstanding. He suffers from chronic lower back pain, hates rainy weather and is a huge fan of Electric Light Orchestra. These little details have been easily surrendered in an attempt to make her feel comfortable. It's almost worked. Viola takes a deep breath and folds both hands in her lap.

"...It had been my last week at the Programme." She stares at her fingers instead of meeting his gaze. No doubt still as apprehensive and curious as it's been these last two hours. "I'd wanted to put in my two-week notice..."

_"...but it wasn't the sort of job where you could do that."_

In spite of stellar attendance since day one Viola almost wasn't at the facility Monday.

She'd come down with a particularly bad case of the common cold (more than likely a side-effect of her daughter always forgetting to wash her hands before coming home from school). Her strict schedule was nearly forced to take an insulting detour from an iron habit, despite her best efforts to combine vitamins and painkillers in her flawless personal cocktail. There may be no firm for her to oversee -- not yet -- but schedules were a way of life, and Viola had drummed hers into her bones. When she arrived seven minutes late, a minor hitch in the program, she made it a _point_ to apologize to Carlton Drake personally.

"Of course. We're notoriously weak creatures, after all, and sooner or later we all catch the bug. I'm sure this won't happen again."

The head of the facility didn't visit the medical staff in-person very often, eternally busy with press and a hundred hidden obligations, but he saw to her progress whenever he was able. Despite their further acquaintance he spoke to her much like he did when they first met; warmly, even gently, breezing through a smile that never _quite_ managed to reach his eyes. She never thought much of it -- they weren't friends, or even long-time co-workers -- but over the last few weeks she's had no choice but to reconsider every one-on-one conversations they've had. Picking apart each and every last detail she'd been naive enough to overlook.

"I know I've asked this before, but a lot of time has passed between then and now. I want to know how your perspective has evolved on the matter. What do you want people to take away with them once they've recovered, Viola?"

Drake had asked (as she attempted to get her sneezing under control). It had been two months and three weeks since the LUX Programme had been ushered in, to be exact, and he was meeting with each department individually to oversee their progress. The world's deadliest _viruses_ couldn't have forced her to miss today.

"I want them to know..." Another sneeze, another apology. Another smile frozen halfway between Drake's lips and long stare. "...I'm sorry, sir. I want my patients to know that the journey is _just_ as important as the destination."

"Most of the time, Viola..." Somehow, the box of tissues he handed her felt like another critique. "...the destination is _all_ that matters."

It was for the greater good. That's what he told her, with his permanent addendum: the more she repeated it to herself, the easier it would become. That's exactly what _he_ did all these years, Drake had taken care to stress just before he opened the door to his office to leave for another indeterminable length of time, and it was the only way to make peace with work nobody could truly prepare themselves for. She had little choice but to follow suit. He'd worked in this field for _far_ longer than she had. The benefit of the doubt was earned and she'd given him a year's worth for free.

"Yes, sir." She had eventually said, hardly a climax to hardly an argument, and turned away for the hundredth sneeze of the day. It was the only time Drake's smile had ever seemed close to sincere.

Viola winces as she rubs her nose with one hand and tucks in her neutral top past her skirt's waistline. This is the _last_ time she uses strips of toilet paper in lieu of proper Kleenex.

The LUX Programme doesn't operate on a nine-to-five schedule. It's functioning night and day, rotating constantly between the tireless efforts of rotating staff, and it's more than that which makes it feel a little out of space and time. The facility walls have never changed from their choking gray, the _click-clack_ of her heels on the polished floor as monotonous a drone as she's ever heard, but soon enough, like the light breaking past a cloud in so many inspirational clinic photos, they would all overcome this final hurdle and _finally_ expose the truth. Even this cold place could be a place of hope, of second chances and reclaimed agency.

Someday.

No matter how many times she says it out loud to her reflection or loops it in her head, the words just seem to come out as just another droll noise in another droll place.

Throbbing headache yet to abate, she at least arrives right on time at the containment chamber, despite the fact her last patient wasn't going anywhere. The man formerly known as Eddie Charles Brock, one of their remaining subjects and still just a number to make the greater good more possible, smiles when he sees her.

"...Hey, Viola. Your hair looks nice."

They haven't removed the lone chair in the cell today, but he's sitting down and leaning against the wall, an exhausted lump in the harsh glow. She knows today's sound session was worse by the way his hair sticks to his forehead and the delayed way his eyes track her movements. There are no magazines in there, either, which she'll have to talk to Janice about once she's done here.

"...Sick today?"

"I think I'm allergic to Mondays." Viola answers, as dry as her throat, and she's met with a wheeze that barely passes for a laugh.

"Treat it with lasagna and a nap. Timeless home remedy." He twitches his head, an almost nervous motion. The smile is more artificial than the light cones. "How was your weekend?"

"A little more relaxing than I'd like. Got around to having that dinner with Scott." She attempts to keep her voice even as she settles into her chair, the two last _clicks_ of her heels signaling the start of their daily hour and a half as confidently as a stopwatch. Hopefully her scratchy voice will cover up the past years'... _regret_ on the matter. "The restaurant wasn't the best, but...he's wanted to visit for a while, so I caved."

"Yeah?" A glint of interest. "Which restaurant?"

Embarrassment isn't her forte, but the heat on her face certainly isn't coming from the ventilation fan or the cold.

"Red Lobster."

"...Ah. Ha ha, oh, _no_. You need to stand up for yourself, Viola." He tries another smile, but it drops quickly. "You can't just let people keep walking over you like that. Not when you could've had a better meal for half the cost at Swan Oyster or something. No longer holding off, then?" A bead of sweat worms its way down the side of his face. She's not allowed to offer him a water bottle or a rag. Not when the alien's unique triggers are only just now being pinned down, even after all this time. "Always a...good sign when you start giving up things like better food for someone you love."

"Too much on our plates...still." Viola would laugh with him, if he weren't such a haunting sight. "Time will tell, I guess."

"You should give it a try." His eyelids flicker, bruised blue with exhaustion. "While you still can."

Eddie's never stopped being fascinated by the mundane details of her life. From the first day they met (met, even such a _simple_ verb makes her scalp tickle with guilt) he asked questions about her. He used to be a journalist, an investigative reporter whose rent and dinner came about through an almost _obsessive_ fascination with the everyday, and she's only learned more than she's wanted to these past almost-three months about a man who used to be _defined_ by his job. Maybe it'd been guilt that led her to humor him. Maybe it'd been professional courtesy. The truth pulls at her, threatening to crack her cool, and Viola pulls back.

Modern medicine and investigative journalism didn't mingle very well, she'd once thought to herself while reviewing each patient's dipping health and struggling to find a pattern to lend overdue credence to the LUX Programme's records. They were always trying to circumvent each other. Keep secrets, save face, claim good while doing little. Perhaps that's where the interest between her and Eddie began. A fascination with each other's vital, terrible career fields. Why _wouldn't_ he be curious, when his own life was just outside this glass and completely out of his reach?

His dime-sized life advice is more than just an affirmation. It's a sobering reminder neatly packaged in an eight-by-eight cell.

"I'll keep that in mind, Eddie."

The man smiles again, and the bead of sweat falls from his chin.

Back when she owned her own practice Viola gave her patients custom calendars. She'd always had a taste for art, but learned at a young age her skills would never land her a steady career. It had been quite the epiphany when she found _another_ use for her flair for color: creating motivational art for her clients. She would design large and small calendars and planners with their favorite colors, filling in other details like beloved animals or musicians they liked. Her receptionist once asked why she didn't just buy them in bulk. Surely it would be easier for someone already low on free time, with full-time hours _and_ a child to raise? But, Viola was quick to correct: her _message_ would have been lost. The simple message that greeted every new person that walked through her old firm in Texas and walked back out, day after day.

That their journey _never_ looked like anyone else's.

One of the most coveted adages in her graduate program was 'passion feeds exhaustion'. Hers certainly came to life when her first patient, the victim of an armed robbery that resulted in a spinal injury, crossed off the last day in their planner and walked out of her practice on his own two feet with his head held high. Despite the trying sessions and low probability for success it became a day that made Viola's tepid heart _soar_. Even her daughter would join her during idle hours in her home office and draw on the inside of calendar or planner covers, rooting for them every step of the way with marker cartoons.

Viola's attempts to debate this point in the LUX Programme had become her tiny form of rebellion against Carlton Drake and his well-meaning severity. Just like fixing a sprained ankle. A stretch here. A tweak in the shoe there. Bit-by-bit, her superior would eventually see she was _right_. Eddie Charles Brock, former investigative reporter and prominent activist in the Bay Area, in spite of how uniformly strange his case was, would be _just_ like the hundreds of stories that reached her desk over the impressive course of her career. Walking on his own two feet again, slowly, but surely. _Surely_.

She adjusts the temperature in her half of the room by a few degrees, turns back to the wall of glass and wonders what the alien occupying his body would think of such misplaced hope.

"Are you cold, Eddie?" Viola asks once she's finished filling out his daily sheet. "I can make it warmer for you, if you like."

"Never." He swipes at his cheek with the heel of his palm. "It...keeps me warm." A somber stretch of silence. Then... "You got someone to keep you warm, until you figure things out with Scott?"

Viola's jaw stiffens. It's a remark that could be flirtatious or desperate, if these mundane things were allowed any space to breathe in the Programme. ...She never should have shared any of these things with him. Her life, little tidbits about who she was, favorite food, none of it. Basic information, like the age of her daughter and where she got her degree, had seemed fine at the time. Then she answered another question about her sleeping habits, if only to scrub away the raw hopelessness in his voice when talking about the new nightmares. Then another about the few happy memories of her childhood, to give him a reason to smile when one therapy session had exhausted him near to _tears_. Then another. Then another. Then _another_.

What were meant to be gestures of kindness -- little reminders of his humanity stifled by four cloying walls without even a painting or monthly _chart_ to break up the monotony -- ended up being another form of torture.

She never even _guessed_.

Her worst stumble on this demoralizing journey was when she found out he and his wife had considered calling off the divorce not _days_ before he was infected. Viola had made a joke about a meet cute she had at college -- just a brief exchange at the campus bookstore that went nowhere -- that put a hollowness in his eyes she never, _ever_ wanted to encounter again. She was a professional of nearly fifteen years. She's witnessed firsthand patients not making it to the end of their calendar. She even had one thrown in her _face_ in her own office when she shared the painful conclusion their nerve system had taken too much damage and couldn't be reversed with today's technology. She's still sure, deep down, she'd nearly ended Eddie that day.

Viola has proceeded to dial these short talks back -- deflect more without coming off as too cold -- but the damage was done, and here she still was, discussing a lackluster date at an unimpressive seafood chain and taking romantic advice from someone who very well may not be able to kiss his wife or find someone else to hold ever again.

"...Stretch your arms out." Viola responds, keeping her eyes on her paper. "Carefully, now."

"I thought the gun show didn't start for another twenty minutes." Eddie leans off the wall and rises to his feet, repeating the motions with weary ease. Despite his visible exhaustion his norepinephrine levels are higher than average. His serotonin and endorphins...lower.

"Focus, Mr. Brock." She almost smiles, in spite of the wretched scratchiness in her throat, and reaches for another tissue. "Do you feel any pain in your shoulders?"

He's a little thinner now, despite a consistent diet, and even though she knows better by now she checks the monitors again to make sure her eyes aren't tricking her regarding his temperature and blood pressure. Her own vital signs are also visible to him. It was mentioned by Ahmed to be a way to... _connect_ with the patients, without talking too much. Viola thinks there are better ways to do that, but she didn't run the facility, nor did she know very much about what the mysterious force they were up against. On top of it all she's done nothing but steadily make things worse when she _should've_ been making things better.

If she made him a calendar, she'd probably forego the inspirational lead-in paragraph and just fill the inside cover with a full-page apology.

"How's Will doing?" He asks as he leans out of his posture, following this question up with a quick scoff under his breath. "Sorry. I suppose they go by LA-4SH now, don't they?"

"Another stretch, please." His muscle movement is consistent, but... "Slowly, now."

"How's, uh..." He bends down, carefully, and doesn't look at the glass. "...How's Ahmed doing?"

Viola pretends to notice something important on the monitor.

"...Please focus, Mr. Brock."

Janice told her knives didn't work on the symbiote. Bullets were, _somehow_ , even more useless. The more conventional weapons turned away the more everyone here was reminded of their own vulnerability. Of how weak they truly were in light of the unknown terrors that still lurked outside of the bounds of even the most dedicated satellite program. Mortality has been a subject she's more acquainted with than the average person. She had cut her teeth on it as a child, studied it carefully in university, witnessed it first-hand as an assistant. She would carry it all the heavier once she obtained the license for her practice. Day after day, week after week, reminders would arrive on her desk in the form of requests for full-time therapy after an exciting football match gone wrong.

A loss of balance walking up a poorly designed flight of stairs at home. A single-passenger vehicle that made an abruptly slow turn. A single slip on a wet patch of grass. Her tolerance for the truth was higher than most.

Humans were weak. She knew this, _majored_ in it, but that didn't stop each reminder in the facility from being more terrifying than the last. The staff only found out one of the symbiote's weaknesses through pure _luck_ during a test session: an ear-splitting scream from a co-worker, when the creature slammed up against the glass wall and shattered the barrier between the facility and the everyday world into a thousand pieces. Ahmed would have been killed, maybe even worse, had his howl of terror not bought the scientists _just_ enough time to subdue the alien with the only other weapon they hadn't tried.

It had been Eddie's.

They came away from the incident with vital knowledge that would be used on the other test subjects in rare intervals: a specific pitch that could only be reached through the aid of a recording and moderate sound mixing. The glass had been cleaned up, replaced and reinforced. Another nasty surprise no doubt waiting for them if they... _she_...continued to fail.

"He talks to me a lot." Eddie says out of the blue, in the middle of her comparing last week's notes, and Viola's chest flutters at the new, uneasy topic.

"...It does?" She responds, eventually, unease only growing when he stares at the far wall. "What...does it say to you?"

"The same thing." His face is impassive as he starts another slow stretch that makes the veins in his arms shiver. "The same thing and the same thing and the same thing."

She doesn't know this man. There _was_ no way to know a person when they were confined twenty-four hours and poked at like a lab rat with lunch breaks. In spite of this...she knows somewhere, _somehow_ , something in him has started to die.

Maybe Eddie could have been someone for her to know better. Viola has indulged in this pathetic fantasy more than once: Eddie Charles Brock signing off on his very last paper, shaking her hand and walking out of the facility's doors with new triumph in his eyes. Just like the hundreds that came before...and maybe a little more. It was barely above a child's daydream, particularly when she rewound the part where she'd run into him a few weeks later through some convenient coincidence at a coffee shop or dental clinic, everyday life breezing past them in a rumbling, mundane blur. They engage in a casual hug that lingers. He mentions her daughter, asks about her health with no trace of irony. They exchange numbers and decide to go to a better seafood restaurant.

Circumstance was a cruel god. They were both its helpless servants, their stars aligned and the only thing separating them a two-way mirror somehow greater than _any_ expanse.

The alien may be contained inside him, but for _how_ long, and to what end, was just as unpredictable as the stars it fell from. Whatever man Eddie Brock used to be...is also contained. When the session wraps up, and her heels _click-clack_ onto the floor one more time, his last request for the day is soft and small:

"Please don't use fire again."

Reaching out to him had been a mistake, but it was one she was determined to keep making. Eddie Brock wasn't a fearful man, yet his face is crumpling in a way that makes the past few months suddenly feel very, _very_ long. Viola softens her voice in turn, in some way to make her next words feel somehow a little less like an outright blow.

"The symbiote can withstand almost anything. It shows a level of vulnerability unheard of by any scientific standard to date. Our records suggest the amount of pain transferred to you is minimal at most." She bites down another scratchy cough and soldiers on. "What's different about fire?"

His voice, as abrupt as a light switch, grows hoarse and _dark_.

" _It hurts_."

Viola's grip on her clipboard digs into her palms. Eddie slowly resumes his spot on the floor, still ignoring the chair, and leans against the wall again. Just like a light, he's back to tired and quiet.

"...If you're unable to contain it after the next session we might have to use a little. Just a little." She smooths down her skirt and tries to imagine the kind of gentle, yet pragmatic platitudes she would have shared at her old practice. "Eddie. You've made _incredible_ progress these past two and a half months. We're coming up on three and the only thing I can say about your physical health is a loss in weight and unusual fluctuation in blood pressure. But any longer spent in...symbiosis...the longer this could put your life at risk. If an extreme temperature is the only way to get it to separate from you this week..." She thinks of what Ahmed told her, that the symbiote had only been driven back, not truly _harmed_ , and her apology ends on a dry, shriveled note. "I'm...sorry."

Eddie's eyes flicker, as blank and bright as the fluorescent buzz above his head.

"...We're sorry, too."

\--

Even relaying her story in a droning monotony perfectly suited to long hours, her interviewer is both turns fascinated and horrified.

"Why'd...you even sign _on_ to a position like this?" Matthew asks, aghast and perfectly ordinary, leaning back in his chair and temporarily losing his professional affect. Viola holds onto hers.

"I had to close my firm when moving near the Bay. I didn't have a reputation in my new city yet and I needed the money to support my daughter...and to pay for the divorce." It feels so robotic, these details of a life that would still be put on hold the moment she stepped back out of this door. "Carlton Drake contacted me a month and one week after I settled in."

"He didn't _tell_ you about the symbiotes before you got accepted as the LUX Programme's primary physical therapist?"

"No, sir."

It had been brought up just as Viola was pulling out a pen to sign the paper. It was a familiar interview, like the near dozen she's had in the past, with the only immediate exception being the isolated location and Carlton Drake's unique brand of charisma.

"An 87% success rate." He rarely took his eyes off his papers, holding them like they still guarded a hidden truth. "Call me old-fashioned, but numbers really do most of the talking, don't they?"

Carlton Drake had added, in a minor aside so casually delivered he could have been discussing the weather, that a rejection of the facility's proposal was _perfectly_ understandable. It was a secretive position, a highly difficult one, at that, and even the impressive annual pay and benefits package may not be enough to replace the loss of her vibrant office culture and vast network. She would simply be... _contacted_ over the following months just in case she decided to change her mind. His smile had been soft, his tone almost apologetic over his knitted fingers. Viola had been secretly grateful she wouldn't have to bother with the fuss.

"He told you before you signed...then gave you a thinly-veiled _threat_ you if you decided to walk out and forget it ever happened." Matthew hedges, a hint of uneasiness creeping into his tone. "Then you find out you're going to play professional party to alien parasites in human hosts. That...must've been quite the shock."

Viola nods, as bland as the room's decor. It would be the least shocking thing she'd see during her time there.

On Tuesday subject LA-4SH devours its human host.

Will used to be a bank teller. His vital signs had been the most stable of _all_ their patients. Now there isn't even a drop of blood left. That's what Ahmed tells her just two hours before she was to start a new round of internal scans, her co-worker's usual good humor completely gone, and she's chilled to the bone. It's such a _strange_ death, even from her more limited perspective on alien biology, and it leaves the head scientists no choice but to freeze it cryogenically until their knowledge can catch up. AG-0NE had died after a separation attempt gone horribly wrong and another hadn't lasted long enough to be given a name. This was protocol was last resort, and _desperate_ , and she's invited to witness the first in what the entire team hopes will be the last time.

Viola doesn't want to see it. Her superiors insist. She looks away as discreetly as possible when a cluster of familiar and unfamiliar faces crowd into the small room to watch the act take place.

The LUX Programme's cold blue flickers in her periphery vision, drawing her gaze like those will-o'-the-wisp fairy fables her daughter loves. Just before the lead scientist presses the button to turn on the ice the symbiote scratches at the glass. A hand, then another, then five, then a _dozen_ , a putrid green, attempting to claw their way back outside to freedom. Viola can't hear it -- it's dead silent in the observatory room, with not even an uncomfortable shuffle of feet to break the still -- but a glance at the audio levels tells her she would lose her hearing in an _instant_ if the specialized pane weren't in the way.

It's not a failure, Drake tells them all later over video chat. Just a delayed success.

" _The greater good is just around the corner_."

Everyone continues what they're doing once the door is shut and sealed, muttering superficial conversations about car troubles and weekend plans to gloss over what happened. She's cold the rest of the day. Ahmed offers to drink coffee with her, like the past five times, but she refuses as politely as she can to call her daughter and feel some semblance of normalcy again. The shrill cheer of Mia's voice slows her swimming head, but even hearing about her new favorite art project doesn't bite into the cold, slippery guilt that's settled into the meat of her palms. She eats reheated quiche alone in her office and reapplies eyeshadow in the company bathroom afterwards.

Three symbiotes gone. Two left. Viola holds her head from where she leans on the counter and tells herself this won't happen again.

\--

Matthew's taciturn assistant glides in and back out without a word. He hands her a cup of water. She takes it, but doesn't drink.

"Did Eddie Brock act...unusual? More than normal, anyway." He follows this comment uncharacteristically fast, as if to make up for some perceived lost ground. "It's just, ah, our sources just suggested the guy was a real, uh, go-getter. The kind of guy that stood out in a room, you know. Ambitious, loud. That sort of thing."

It's probably meant to lighten the mood. A small gesture to perk her up and give her a second wind. Viola had to become comfortable with the art of soft-yet-appropriate humor herself working in physical therapy, but she still can't imagine this man would try a joke if he'd seen what she had. Her answer is as dry as the paper cup in her hand.

"There wasn't much for him to go _get_."

Wednesday is the second time Eddie's symbiote speaks to her, the first time it's seemed anything _other_ than openly hostile, and Viola doesn't know what to do.

Eddie's was the only symbiote that didn't like to talk to the medical staff. The rare time it _did_ it was barbed. Angry. So much so the co-head changed its codename from SP-1DE to V3-N0M, just to honor its uniquely poisonous nature. Every single room in the LUX Programme, within _and_ without, are recorded. It's silent not out of secrecy, she theorizes, but because it just doesn't care. Symbiotes gained features from their hosts, she learned from Drake and Janice and Ahmed, so that must mean Eddie Brock also never cared...or, at least, grew to. He used to be a journalist, whose _job_ it was to care very deeply about how he was perceived, and this couldn't be a more surefire sign he's given up on _that_ aspect of his life, too.

She's seen symbiotes completely envelop their human hosts. The first time she witnessed this it hadn't even been in-person. Viola was handed a short video, shown to her by Drake personally, and she vividly remembers growing nauseous and a little light-headed seeing a person she could've encountered on the street or at the grocery store being completely covered in a slimy, suffocating blanket of flesh. LA-4SH had been entirely blue, like a sickly bruise, and she'd only ever seen video feeds of the tempestuous RI-1OT, the first to permanently bond with its human host and the first to transform into a creature Janice once admitted she still has wide-awake nightmares about. V3-N0M, the woman once told her, was as dark as an ink spill, and somehow the most ghastly.

Some days it doesn't feel real, working at the LUX Programme, and Viola craves distance whenever possible. From the other workers, from the truth tucked deep into the cold crannies of this place, even from the patients she was supposed to help. All that time spent walking on the sidelines has her ill-prepared for today's session. She first realizes this when she approaches the wall of glass and is startled to find she doesn't recognize the man inside.

"...Where is Eddie?" Viola whispers, to the face that _looks_ like Eddie, if more pale than normal, but the blue eyes that stare back at her are someone she doesn't know very well at all.

" _Indisposed_."

It's not Eddie's voice. It's too deep. Hoarse. A stranger's nails prickling up the skin of her arm.

"Is he..." She clears her throat, then follows through with a long, slow swallow. "...sick?"

" _No more than anyone else here_."

"Will you..." Viola sets her clipboard down carefully. Her cold is gone, but her throat is now disobeying her for entirely different reasons. "...be speaking to me today, then?"

" _The glass remains, and so does the fire, so, yes_." His smile isn't uneven and tired now. No, it reminds her of curtains being suddenly pulled apart, all of his teeth stretched wide and bright. " _We will_."

Eddie's physical diagram is flickering all over. Instead of a steady rise and fall his health bars flash, blink, disappear and reappear with no discernible pattern she can latch onto. She hastily theorizes it's because the alien doesn't override its host every day, not when they were symbiotic rather than parasitic, but her knowledge has hit a block and she's at a _complete_ loss on what to think. She should be calling for help now. This isn't her jurisdiction. But if she does...V3-N0M could _leave_. Dissolve inside Eddie's veins again and take with it valuable insight that could make all this finally worth it. Wasn't that why she was here? To return people back to their lives no matter how tragic the accident?

"We need to..." She clears her throat again, quicker this time. "...I need to check your vitals."

" _You look tense today, Viola._ " Eddie's expression is almost childishly exaggerated, raised eyebrows and wide eyes a crude mimicry of polite sympathy. " _The helpless suffering of your caged patients wearing you thin?_ "

She opens her mouth to say that's _not_ what they're doing...only for something else to come out entirely.

"Why...why won't you let Eddie _go?_ " Her voice is shrill, entirely unprofessional, but she feels like she's careening down a hill, at the mercy of her personal gravity and unable to stop. "We're not trying to _hurt_ you. We're just doing this so we can understand you better. You showed up out of nowhere and...and we don't know what to _do_. Why won't you just let him go so he can go back to his family? Why are you hurting him like this?"

" _Why won't you let your offspring go? Your space among your pack rats. Those clothes to cover your hairy hide?_ " Even through the glass' sheen his pupils are pinpricks. A vein in his neck pulses in the light. " _Go on, Viola. We really do have all day_."

"My daughter _needs_ me. I _need_ my job and my clothes. You don't need to do this to him." The symbiotes fed off chemicals in the human body. She may not be a scientist, but she knew enough. Despite its strange form, its unpredictable biology, it was intelligent. It wasn't a tapeworm or a virus. It was a living, breathing creature with thoughts and wants and it _had_ to have some shred of empathy in there somewhere, too. "You could find another host." She barely realizes she's gripping her skirt. Too incensed to focus on how she's ruining the delicate fabric. "You could find someone else, you could just leave him be. We're not here to hurt you. We just need to _understand-_ "

" _Understand. They want to slice us up and pull us apart_." His face flexes with another pantomime, too twisted, like a hand in a puppet stretching the fabric to react, expressions flickering faster than she can prescribe meaning. " _They don't wish to understand any of this_."

"I _do!_ "

The chaos in Eddie's expression dies down and becomes...inscrutable. His head dips low, shadows hanging heavy over his eyes...or, rather, the symbiote's. A chill trickles down her spine to leave her legs numb. This isn't a question for her to ask, but her fear for the man's safety and the realization she's one of the _few_ people this creature has chosen to talk to clouds her better judgment, and her mouth is opening again like she's the one possessed.

"Why would a symbiote eat its own _host?_ "

" _...Maybe the host asked it to_."

She has to inhale and exhale a few times before she can ask her next, and last, question.

"Will you...eat Eddie?"

Viola has never had it speak to her before. She's also never heard it laugh. They needed their host to survive like a human needed food and sunlight and water, yet Eddie _grins_ , tosses his head back, what seem like all his teeth flashing in a coarse, mortifying chortle. Her mind tries to put the pieces together -- she wasn't a scientist, barely a psychologist -- and she's only left more troubled when it finally stops chuckling and answers:

" _We would sooner devour you_."

\--

Carlton Drake visits again, uncharacteristically early and completely devoid of his meticulous charm. He tells Viola the LA-4SH symbiote will be cryogenically frozen. So will V3-N0M and Eddie. She _begs_ him not to go through with this plan.

"What is all this, Viola? You never seemed like the type to take someone's position for granted." His voice is as pleasant as it ever is, though undercut with a thin frost that warns her to step down and soon. He's always dressed like he's attending a funeral -- dark neutrals and conservative necklines -- and it's never been a more valid look.

"I assure you, sir, I'm not. It's just...I'm close to a breakthrough. I'm _so_ close, I can...I can feel it." It wasn't her job to push probablys and maybes, but the alternative...the alternative was so much _worse_.

"...Oh?" His dark eyes flash with interest. It's that obsessive passion he kept tempered behind genial words and a clean suit. "Do you have any concrete evidence for this claim?"

Viola swallows back the urge to lay it all out at his feet. She _did_ have evidence, a veritable _book's_ worth after just one session, but...she can't share it. Any of it. She _can't_ tell him V3-N0M spoke to her personally and confessed its complex understanding of human society, sense of identity, bitterness _and_ judgment. Not when that would light a blaze in Drake's gaze and make him do something drastic. He would confine Eddie further, run so many tests the man was hardly more than skin on _bone_. Maybe he would cryogenically freeze him, anyway, until his mysterious knowledge dictated otherwise.

Her superior lets out a snort, one pitch-perfect note of contempt, and Viola feels her previous fervor go out in a puff of smoke.

"The greater good isn't concerned about our _feelings_ , Viola, and they mess things up more often than not, in my experience. Remember what you're doing for the world. The lives you're saving. The ones that haven't even been born." He slowly raises one eyebrow. "Your daughter."

She keeps her face still. Even though he has no _right_ to use Mia against her. Not when he himself had no children, no significant other, devoted only to his work and colleagues and an ideal that seemed less noble and more fanatic by the _day_. Perhaps not even then, she realizes with a hint of guilt. Viola still respected him for what was a thankless and terrifying job, and an even smaller part of her had to admit...she saw some of herself in Drake. A dispassionate and cold man, all the more detached in his attempt to weather the blows of people struck down by circumstance. As _she_ had to be in a field all about new starts...and new endings.

The comparison stops there. No. No, she could never be this _cold_.

Viola had once thought she and Eddie could get to know each other better once he was free from the alien. A friendship, perhaps something more, _finally_ breaking free of the boundaries of professionalism and tragedy. She could share that she'd once been a cheerleader and even tried out for the basketball team before she accepted she was far too short and too passive for the drama of the court. Maybe she'd find out something else about Eddie, at that superior restaurant of their (his) choosing. About the good intentions and shady methods he'd been known to do throughout his career, maybe. His obsessive hobbies behind closed doors. She might have judged him more, another time, but all she can think about are second chances, and she's becoming ready to admit she might not deserve hers.

It was a betrayal, to _all_ sides.

Viola arrives to their appointment an hour early to ask Ahmed to give her just a little extra time to work with her remaining patient. This schedule has been strictly adhered to, as all good schedules _should_ be, and her co-worker is visibly startled at her additional request to disable the room's cameras on top of it.

"Turn them...off? But _why_ , we need any and all acute reactions in case..." He says the words slowly, aware that she _knows_ , and it's more a gesture for her to elaborate than a blemish on her skill.

"One of the most important elements between a professional and their patient is trust." Viola elaborates. "Eddie has cameras on him twenty-four seven. He knows this. The symbiote knows this. He needs to trust _me_ with what he's going to hear...regarding his fate."

All their hard work won't be undone by a slightly longer break from insanity, she argues with an affect usually reserved for only the most stubborn of clients, and Ahmed must take some sort of pity on her, because he concedes and lets her inside...though not without a warning to proceed with caution. It's a wonder he can sound so light after nearly being killed by this same alien not weeks ago. Viola may never understand easy generosity, and she hopes she will someday as she steps into the dark and shuts the door carefully behind her.

The routine of setting everything up bleeds the shakiness from her hands. The _click-clack_ of her heels comforts her as she settles into her seat. The soft _snap_ as she removes her health sheets from the clipboard and sets them side-by-side is the finishing touch on her composure. Then a strange groaning that has never _once_ existed in this space makes her go completely still.

She hasn't turned on the lights yet. The cold blue emanating from the floor in his cell is the only trail her eyes can follow. The black above moves -- at least, she _thinks_ it does -- and the more she stares the more impossible it is to separate shadow from human or symbiote. Eddie's somewhere inside the dark. Moaning...but not in pain.

Viola's mouth goes completely dry.

" _Not quite the gun show you were hoping for..._ " A familiar voice sighs from within. " _...what **did** you hope to see, Viola?_ "

Her mind has frozen like a clot. The only company Eddie was given are herself and the primary doctors. The only time he was able to talk to other patients was to analyze the symbiotes' reaction to one another (often disappointing and fruitless due to the symbiote's self-centered natures). Eddie, he's...he's _lonely_. He's alone, he's _been_ alone. Something less logical follows, a familiar feeling deep in the pit of her stomach, and Viola can't reason with it in the span of time between the black mass stretched from one side of the glass to another and a face appearing in the dark.

Twin white spots. A fanged grin she now knows.

" _We can't smell your fear in this glass box, but it must be cloying_." It's not laughing, not like it did, but its voice is wolfish amusement.

Viola tries to settle her hands into working order and fails. Tries to swallow past the patch in her throat and fails again. It's...it's fear. It's curiosity. That's what her mind is _telling_ her, loud and clear in the silence, and she would believe it, if she hadn't glanced at the glowing box in the corner and heard what the facility's top-of-the-line technology had to say. Her blood pressure is high...but not spiked. Her body is thrumming not with cortisol, but with endorphins. Her vitals are suggesting something much, _much_ different.

" _We didn't come here to understand. We came to survive. To feed and grow. You humans are never satisfied with your basic instincts. Your desires split you apart..._ "

Now she hears a huffing sigh, one that transitions to a long, low groan that echoes in the chamber. A distinctly human sound breaking through the alien's distorted rumble. The symbiote whispers something, far too quiet for her to catch, before continuing.

" _You all just want to understand...even if understanding leads you to your death._ "

If she presses to the glass, close enough to swallow her reflection, she could confuse the churning twist in the black for a body. A man in the throes of a...

" _Is that why you're here? To understand?_ "

Viola barely holds back her scream when the symbiote suddenly slams against the glass.

" ** _Answer us!_** "

Her chair hits the far wall in her haste to back away. Scrabbling her papers together and without another word she fumbles the observatory door back open and slams it shut behind her. Viola hits her back against the white wood, breath coming out shallow and fast.

"...What happened?" Ahmed asks not a minute later, thick brows tight with confusion. "Viola, talk to me. What did you see? Did they say anything?"

She looks at his calendar, at the notes cluttered into each tiny square and, for the first time in a long time, she can't count the days.

\--

One of her patients had no choice but to go under the knife to keep their legs.

A sign of hope and an extended journey, all at the same time. It had been a trying six month period. They'd done _everything_ right. Viola was ever on time, keen and careful from consultation to exercise. Her patient showed up to every single session, sometimes five minutes early, calendar almost _bursting_ with additional notes and leaflets from magazines or prints from the library. Their new diet had been carefully adhered to, without so much as a moment of weakness during a holiday dinner. Despite all this, it still came down to a surgery that had a high chance of failure.

A surgery that didn't work, because that was just the way of it sometimes.

"Mama?"

Viola lifts her hand from her head and finishes chewing the salad that's become barely more flavorful than paper. Deep in her thoughts of failure instead of listening to what her daughter has to say.

"I'm...I'm sorry, sweetheart." She pushes bangs out of her eyes and smiles. "I missed that. Say it again?"

Mia is disappointed, but her curiosity wins out.

"Did you have a bad day?"

She would sooner walk on the hot pavement outside barefoot than share even the faintest inkling of all that's happened. Her daughter is staring at her with bright brown eyes, cheeks full of food and more future commentary to cheer up her mother.

"Mama, want me to make another calendar for you? I did watercolors today." She pokes in another potato and attempts to talk around it. "I have-a billion colors you can use. I can make any color."

"Chew and swallow before speaking." She chides, gently. "I might not be making those for a while, button. But keep practicing in the meantime."

She's disappointed again. Mia chomps noisily on her meal and pokes at her plate. Then comes the third disappointment of the evening, right on time like everything else in her life.

"When's Dad gonna eat dinner with us?"

She has Scott's eyes. Wide and dark and earnest. When they teamed up they could wear Viola down with just a shared look between them. If he were at the table he would tell Mia a joke to make her laugh and turn the awkwardness into a detail of the night.

Eddie had considered returning to his ex-wife. He had been in the process of finishing up a series on renovation practices in low-income San Francisco districts when it happened. An almost _charming_ coincidence, timed with her distance with her fiance after their falling out and divorce-in-progress. All his plans, doomed to the fanaticism of Carlton Drake or the cowardice of Violette 'Viola' Martin. To think she'd thought she could have met him at a new crossroads. The meet-cute crafted by a living, breathing horror.

Viola considers the cherry tomatoes on her half-eaten plate and resists the urge to glance at the empty chair across the table, the one Mia keeps pushing over in spite of this separation being old hat. Depriving her daughter of a good man...and depriving a good man of his life. She never expected to find something this big or feel quite _this_ empty.

Where was the good in all this?

\--

Matthew has grown visibly worried these past few minutes. She already knows what's coming next on those three sheets of paper, and the surrealness of the past twelve hours is still thick enough to keep the unease at bay.

"I'm just stunned you're alive." Another _tap-tap_. "Your injuries are inconsistent with what we saw in some of the other victims. Namely the bruises around your neck. Then there's the small scratch on your thigh and a shallow cut on your arm." For a second the genial demeanor drops and is replaced with a harsher affect. "I won't go into the details, or even show you the photos, but...something isn't adding up. Not when there were people torn to shreds and you _literally_ got away with little more than scratches."

It doesn't come easy to her, but she's still looking at the situation like a spreadsheet, and the words flow out with the utmost calm.

"I was spared."

"That's exactly it." He waits until she looks him in the eye before speaking. "... _why?_ "

Viola finally takes a sip of her water.

The facility's final test subject, LA-4SH, dies Thursday evening.

One of the geneticists quits the same day. She finds out when she visits Janice's office and finds it abruptly, _entirely_ , empty. Drake's increasing presence in the LUX Programme's main building has yet to feel natural. Even more so when he says Janice wasn't cut out for the job and had to put in her two-week notice a little earlier than expected. He denounces her unprofessional and sends an appreciative look Viola's way. As if she were truly so _different_. As if she were here because she was a brave pioneer for the future of humankind and not a coward caught in-between two cowardly decisions: to let down these patients or, in Drake's words, let down the _world_.

The facility is as spotless as ever, but everything is falling apart at the seams. It was always a distant possibility Viola would be the last one left standing, outlined in fine print she read carefully and deemed _understandable_ , _a sad necessity_ , _a professional stipulation_. She's the everyday outlier in a facility staffed with experienced biologists, scientists and government representatives. Hired partially because of that mundane little detail, kept firmly in place _because_ of it, so she lets herself cry out mundane tears where nobody can see, even though she was always being watched everywhere she went. Whether in the cold second-floor bathroom or her meticulously tidy little office.

A deceptively ordinary day. Janice left a note on her desk before leaving, handwriting far more blocky than she recognizes from her brief acquaintanceship with the woman. Viola doesn't read it, because if she does she'll have to accept the reality of her resignment. Mia goes to bed early after dinner, too tired for a tantrum after dance recital. Scott calls her cell late that night. Viola doesn't pick up and tucks in early herself.

Her dreams are disturbing, her index and middle finger deep inside her more so, and she can't bring herself to hear his voice right now when she can only hear another, contemptuous and commanding. Oil on her skin.

Poison in her mind.

\--

A pocket of silence has grown in-between the hard questions and slow answers. The man has leaned back, arms crossed and legs spread in a stance both casual and assertive. Viola finishes her cup of water and lets the stale taste soak into her tongue.

"...No previous combat training. Half the facility gone, several people dead or missing, the esteemed Carlton Drake _nowhere_ to be found...and here you are." Matthew murmurs. "If I seem harsh right now then you have my sincerest apologizes. We're glad you're unharmed, of course. Can't imagine what you're going through after seeing all that. These details are just...they're giving us more questions than they are answers, and we _really_ need answers."

"...Same here, sir."

Friday.

Viola glides through the halls as quickly as she can, the _click-clack_ of her shoes loud with finality. A sound she'll hear even in deep sleep, if she ever sleeps again. Mia deserved better than a mother with too many nightmares and too little peace. Her field needed someone who did the right thing, even when it was difficult. _Especially_ so. Scott...she had given up their dream long ago.

Eddie...

The harder and faster she walks the more the sound drums into her, beating down the cold fear that's sat at the base of her spine ever since she reached her decision. She was going to give all these families closure. She was going to find better people, better than everyone here, including Carlton Drake, including _her_ , to find that silver lining on the cloud. Viola would put this schedule behind her for good and never look back. Maybe she wasn't cut out for this kind of work, maybe she was a coward _and_ a pushover, but she could _do_ something now.

The LUX Programme's small, experienced team trust each other. If they didn't they would 'quit' like the others. The code to his cell is still in Ahmed's possession. It would have no other reason to be. She finally takes him up on his offer to drink coffee together in his office and pockets his key card when he's dumping the remains of his meal in the trash. He asks if she'll join him on his smoke break, too, but she makes an excuse about a phonecall to her daughter's school, despite the fact she'd already left a message an hour ago.

She inwardly apologizes to him, and everyone else in the facility, before stepping inside.

The containment chamber is dark and silent. Not even the floor lights are on, making it feel like she's looking directly into a black hole, with all the implications of the metaphor. If either of them are awake, she wouldn't know it. Staring at the glass...she actually realizes she has no idea what her last words to him could be. Perhaps there was nothing she could say without just rubbing salt into the wound.

"Don't hurt Eddie. Don't hurt _anybody_. Just go and...know I'm _sorry_."

' _My work is not useless_.' She thinks to herself as she swipes the card, then punches in the staff identification numbers to open Eddie Brock's cell. ' _Not anymore_.'

Even _with_ the plan to put them into cryogenic containment soon the locks are on standby, and even Ahmed's position can't override Drake's schedule. An alarm goes off immediately, a sharp blare that makes her stomach lurch as her plan abruptly arrives to its dizzying conclusion. The clock has begun. _She has to go_.

Viola wrenches open the door and runs out without looking back. The LUX Programme's pale visage is gone. Everything is flashing from blue to red. She moves as quickly as possible as alarmed voices raise up and down the halls, heading straight to where the lobby spreads out in its familiar smooth disc. A canned recording she's never heard before plays overhead, its detached affect a robotic contrast in the facility's sudden chaos. Doors open. Faces blur.

" _All personnel needs to head to the emergency exit...repeat, all personnel needs to head to the..._ "

Feet drum above her on the catwalks. Her cell buzzes in her overcoat pocket. It's only when she starts to near the lobby does she realize, with a cold drop of her heart...she forgot to grab evidence. Something, _anything_ , to continue where everyone here left off. Continue how, she doesn't know, but if she _doesn't_ , if she just leaves with little more than her anecdotes and the target on her back...

The emergency exit appears before her in a red rectangle. Viola stares at it for a surreal second, then steers her shaking legs around and back toward the hallway labyrinth teeming with confused personnel.

"What's going on?!"

" _Who tripped the alarm-_ "

A hand grabs her arm. She tugs out of it before the cowardice settles and makes her surrender prematurely. She'll never know who it was. The first scream comes from the catwalk above.

The facility was never a warm and forthcoming place, but the sudden chill that meets her when she leaves the lobby and heads down the office hallway is biting. An emptiness so heavy it feels _physical_. The security cameras are still on, there's no doubt about that. She wonders how they'll catch her, with her final moments not just setting free their last subject, but digging around in fileboxes that aren't hers or even within her department. Viola bites her lip as she pulls out folders and notes from Adam's office. Her palms are too greasy. She takes a few moments to wipe them over her skirt in shaky repetitions.

Adam was one of the biology assistants. His notes are filled with terminology her eyes can't stick to and she splays out a mess of papers all over his desk in an attempt to sort them out with her looming deadline. The alarm is still blaring, what few voices are left receding into silence. She has no idea where everyone else is going. There were multiple emergency exits and escape plans, even though Drake himself said the possibility of needing these resources was 'highly unlikely'. Panicked possibilities blink in and out of her vision as she clumsily digs through the filebox, angling her chin over her shoulder every other second and cursing her good will, trying to will her eyes to read faster, spot something incriminating enough to take with her-

Then the alarms go dead. She lifts her head. All save for one, somewhere on the floor above.

A muffled thrumming follows. The hairs on the back of her neck turn into needlepoints. The _click-clack_ of her heels are as loud as a gunshot in the lull. Viola steps away from the desk, inches toward the half-open door to peer down the long slope of the hallway...and finds it staring back.

The stolen papers slip from her nerveless fingers to scatter along the ground like leaves at the massive shadow in the middle of the hall.

" ** _Viola_**."

Its head brushes the ceiling. A hulking creature _just_ human enough to seem familiar and _just_ strange enough to spread a hot-and-cold chill down the length of her spine. It's not the curling, clawed hands or even the unnaturally broad shoulders that make her skin crawl...but the _face_. Viola's body has gone completely numb. Adrenaline is trying to shout some sense into her legs, but her feet are stone, her fingers are _ice_ , and the only movement aside from the papers still settling along the floor is her palpitating heart.

"...Eddie?"

A slow smile. A smile filled with so many crooked, jagged teeth it's impossible to count. Her mind spurts forth unpleasant similes of cracked piano keys. Dead tree branches. Things that used to be beautiful now ruined beyond repair. It's a perfect metaphor, she thinks with the vague hysteria of someone well beyond the point of panic, for a creature as mercurial as a symbiote.

" _Venom_."

Her stomach is roiling, a nauseous _churning_ trying to reason with the sight before her, all the worse that the voice sounds so very much like and so very _unlike_ the man she tried to reach out to all these long months and she's now very certain has been eaten alive. It's walking toward her, stepping on the shards of glass without even flinching. The corn cob LED's broken circuitry reveals its swollen, humanoid form in blinks, carving it out from where the hall breaks and splits into two at its back, black skin bouncing back each flash as harshly as a mirror. His distorted voice shudders in her teeth. Inching right under her nails.

" _We learned so many things here. Humanity is degradation. Overrated_." A chuckle. A thrum of pressure she feels displace the air. " _...And unpredictable. There is a spine in you after all. We didn't even have to dig it out_."

"I-I'm sorry. I'm _sorry_. I should have done this sooner, it's my fault, you never asked for any of this, both of you, I was a coward, I-" Viola stammers, each syllable weak, sloppy. She's interrupted easily.

" _Oh, is this the part where we thank you?_ " The smile splits wide, like a crack in pavement, grotesque and familiar. " _We understand gratitude...as a concept. We were afflicted with it, the moment the doors opened and we tasted freedom on the tip of our tongue_..." A cock of the head. "... _but does gratitude also include the overwhelming desire to peel the flesh from your bones?_ "

She should run. She should beg for her life. She shouldn't be working up another apology from the pit of her stomach, ripe after too many excuses swallowed and so many sleepless nights her eyes were permanently bruised.

"I don't..." Viola finds her voice, faint and weak though it is, and the words come out firm. "I don't blame you. Not for one _minute_."

The flickering lights play with her eyes. One blink, then two, and the creature is in front of her, without _any_ sound, close enough for her to feel the hot gust of its breath like a furnace and begin a useless count of every single last crooked fang. A hand larger than her head reaches forward to curl around the back of her neck. The hair on her arms ripple.

" _We don't blame us, either_."

The curved points of his claws catch on the flyaway hairs at the nape of her neck as they travel around to her jawline, then to her cheek, then again in reverse. Petting her like a cat, long and slow. Her skin clutches when he curls thick fingers around her chin. She can't help it, even after _all_ this time to get familiar with the unfamiliar, and hot panic spikes through her haze. Viola flinches. She crushes her eyes shut and waits for something violent to cut her world off into sudden darkness. Instead...she feels the hand disappear, then return as a tug on her scalp. She opens one eye, then the other...to find Venom curling a loop of her hair around one finger. It's only the sheen from the lights that separates the dark lock from his oily skin.

" _Did you already forget the way you looked at us?_ " His eyes gleam like glass. " _We didn't_."

It doesn't click, at first. She stares stupidly, repeating the phrase in her head. Her breath catches on the realization, then flutters and dies as belated thoughts catch up in a cloying rush. Freedom. Revenge. Lust. The last rings true, as jarring as any alarm, and Viola is twisted from all the months spent in this place. She _must_ be, if she's thinking her body would make a sound last apology. The last thing she could offer to the man whose normal life was whisked away forever. To the creature that fell to earth and was held in captivity, experimented and tested into _insanity_.

"If..." She doesn't know how it works, not entirely, but... "If Eddie's...in there, just...tell him I'm so sorry."

" _Such a word! Sorry this, sorry that. Apologies burst from your mouth like flies. Rotten sentiments and about as pretty_." She can see herself reflected in its curved, laughing eyes. " _We are Eddie. We are the symbiote. We are Venom_."

"...Venom." She whispers. An affirmation, a confession, she doesn't know. His smile, somehow, becomes even bigger.

" _You say it so sweetly. To flay or to kiss? Oh, we are torn_." His tongue sinks past the tangle of teeth to slide along her cheek, a slimy press that has her shuddering, and he follows this almost tender touch by curling it around her ear. " _Eddie insisted on dreams of you. We were jealous, at first, but after your little debacle we are starting to see the appeal..._ "

Too many questions and not nearly enough time. She thinks she could accept that the symbiote had grown attracted to her out of Eddie's influence, and she _it_ out of some depraved curiosity, if this were even _remotely_ in her capacity to comprehend. Her mind trips and repeats over the word 'jealous'. Did the alien view Eddie akin to...a lover? Could it even be _called_ that? She recalls how the symbiote's vital signs had spiked upon seeing her, how her own had followed suit, the _noises_ they made together, and her world, if possible, makes even less sense than before.

"I-I don't, I'm-" She can't even figure out how to phrase it. This, _any_ of this. "You...I want to understand, it's just so strange, I..."

" _Eddie was tormented by lost others. Starved without touch. We soothed this animal urge, but in doing so, found ourselves..._ " Another gust of breath, hot enough to sting. It smells like blood. " _...lacking anew_."

It's as if the facility is no longer here. At first it was a strange dream, one she was so sure she would want to wake up from. Now...

Venom nuzzles his mouth against her hair, close enough for her to feel the rumble of his next words:

" _We want to understand, too_."

...Then it sinks in. _Clicks_ like a new vocabulary word, no longer needing so much energy just to recall, much less use. Her hands, once useless weights at her sides, slowly reach up to slide up his front. His skin is slippery without being wet. Warm. Almost hot. His pulse beats against her palms as she figures out through touch the sloping hulk of its shoulders, the thick neck blending into skull. Venom lets her study in silence, the only other movement the constant flicker-throb of those spidery-white veins. Staring at the subtle gradient of brown skin against oily sheen doesn't make the scenario sink in anymore...but there's something almost hypnotic about the deep rise and ebb of his chest.

When her hand moves to his face, he doesn't move or growl or comment. Letting her trickle clammy fingertips along the side of those shining, terrible teeth.

"...Okay." Viola breathes. She tugs her hand back when he grins.

" _One more session, then...and you won't speak a **word**_."

That dark head sinks next to her ear, jagged maw stretching wide to slide his tongue along her other cheek, moving gradually across her mouth. Saliva oozes down her chin and she shuts her mouth instinctively...only to open it immediately when Venom's fingers curl around her neck again and squeeze her throat _tight_. The second she does, a gasp of surrender, his tongue dips past her lips and thrusts inside. She coughs, then _chokes_ as he pushes in far too deep. It doesn't hurt, but it's _uncomfortable_ , her throat wholly unprepared and clenching fitfully. Then, just as soon as it happens...it ends. He leans back, still too close, and slowly licks along his lipless mouth, leaving a smudge of her red lipstick on his teeth in a chilling imitation of blood.

Thick arms encircle her. Two massive hands rest at her back, feeling her thin coat, then _gripping_ it, shredding both layers of soft cotton. Viola's pants rise and fall unevenly as the tips of his claws hitch over her goosebumps and the nobs of her now-exposed spine, a shallow tremble of her chest like a terrified mouse. One wrong breath is all that's needed. It may even be something he _wants_ and, for some disturbed reason, the thought doesn't make her pass out then and there. No, animal terror of the unknown is mingling with something else she can't describe, even though she can feel the truth of it all stalking the edges of her mind. Venom doesn't have eyes as she understands, only two white slits that communicate _nothing_ , but she feels like she's being inspected as he tilts his sleek head from side-to-side.

Just like she's done to him for nearly three months, except there's no glass between them now.

Venom's breath has changed, too, and it's the only clue she has to what he's thinking before he abruptly shove her against the wall by the door. He takes her bra in his teeth, _wrenching_ it off with a twist of his head. She grimaces as the straps cut cruelly into her back, holding tenuously before coming up with a _snap_. With a flick to the side he tosses it to the floor and returns, running his tongue up between her breasts all the way up to where her exposed throat flutters erratically. He dips down again, letting it curl around one like a wet hand, squeezing, stroking. It retracts, snake-like, then flicks out again to graze her nipple. The facility alarm is still pinging down the hall, a lone cry for help, and it's too faint to drown out his laugh when she, against _all_ reason, grows stiff.

" _Lying mouths and honest bodies._ "

Her skin blinks from hot to cold and back again as he switches to her other breast, rolling it wetly _just_ in the spread of his mouth, then drops it to lap indolent circles along her stomach. The tip of his tongue dips into her navel, slides around it, wet pressures that leave her slick and shivering in the stale room. He's controlling her with sticky touches and the ever distant promise of less control, transitioning from rough to careful as easily as an inhale to an exhale. His inherent threat is always just around the corner, this hasn't changed from the second he stepped through the door with the destruction of the facility spurting at his back, and Viola still can't come to grips with the way her body is _responding_.

The white-hot clench of fear throbs with the goosebumps, right alongside a pulsing ache deep between her legs, a maddening wetness growing so heavy it's threatening to inch down her thighs.

" _Cold, are we?_ " Claws prick into the thin skin of her collar again and make her go as rigid as a board. This time his touch is anything _but_ soft. " _We were **cold** for months_."

She knows. She _knows_ , regrets it all, and if more pain was needed to get this across she'll pull her spine out herself. Viola wonders how much of this creature's anger is from Eddie. How much is from the symbiote. A ruthless combination of _both_. These thoughts try to hold her down as Venom loops a foreclaw in her skirt and tugs it down her legs, splaying it onto the floor, then nibbles at her tights. Holes pop into the fragile fabric and it's soon peeled off like a layer of skin, flicked to the ground with the rest. When his massive head dips between her thighs and his breath beats against her underwear the heat in her stomach hits a crescendo.

Her skin jumps and bunches nervously as the side of his teeth slide against her, to snag one curved fang in the cotton, tugging it down her legs at a crooked angle. She's shaking so hard she can't see straight. With apprehension, with _need_ , she doesn't _know_.

" _Your higher curiosity fights your lowest instinct..._ "

Venom drops its tongue terribly long and low and red to ooze onto the floor, and she has no time to prepare before it flicks up and slides inside her.

Viola hits the back of her head against the wall in a _gasp_ , twisting with overdue shock, and Venom holds her still with a careless shift of one huge hand. She clutches at the massive black fingers, mouth working with pitiful twitches as he inches his way inside her. His tongue, far too hot, plunges in and out, lapping away at her arousal, and the clench of her thighs is a horrifying betrayal of all the things in her life that made _sense_. A groan bubbles out of him, shivering into her, and she _whimpers_ , eyes rolling back in her head as her entire body ripples with weak-kneed approval. He pulls out only to flick along her clit, tiny touches that shock, then shoves back up and _in_.

Jagged fangs almost snag on her short thatch of hair as he licks uncomfortably deep, rolling obscenely, and she can just make out the shameless, _slick_ sounds in-between pants. Twisting his head, twin white stripes curved with pleasure, teeth graze her inner thigh, always a threat no matter how elegant his movements. She tries to spread her legs in time, but her mind is fuzzy with adrenaline and this incredible ( _wrong_ ) pleasure, and she isn't nearly quick enough. A fang nicks her, hard enough to draw blood, and Venom abruptly stops moving. He withdraws with a crude slurp, so suddenly she almost _begs_ , and slowly runs it over the cut blooming red.

Viola is off the wall and hitting the ground before she can even blink, what feels like every last possible shred of air bursting out of her in another rush. The symbiote is a malevolent shadow, lights bursting fitfully around his silhouette from where his back faces the doorway. The mocking thrum of his voice has vanished, replaced with a hiss colder than the floor against her spine.

" _We should eviscerate you_."

One massive hand snakes over her throat and presses down.

" _Eddie wasn't the only one who dreamed_." Venom hisses over the pulse pounding in her ears. " _Repetitive visions of your spread thighs beat bruises into our minds, matched only by the delicious cacophony of your pleas for mercy. Simpering cries, even a wail that would have us peeled apart, they were motivation of the highest order. A choir even we would pray to._ "

He leans down and licks into her mouth again, drooling messily on her chin as she struggles in vain to suck in more than a _shred_ of air-

" _...But you liiike this_." His hand shifts around her neck in a ponderous flex, tensing, then relaxing, like he's savoring every second of it. " _Could you make sense of the gray matter that governs your piteous, sour breath?_ " That impossibly deep voice becomes mocking all over again. " _Your poor not-husband. Will anything compare to what we've done here?_ "

Viola's nails dig into the skin of his wrist. She doesn't speak, because she _can't_ , and even if she could...she hasn't forgotten. Venom smiles.

" _Good girl._ "

Gratification flickers through her, sweet and surprising, but her sight is starting to grow fuzzy in the corners. Viola's fingers slip. All it would take is the most minute adjustment in pressure, an afterthought for a creature designed for cruel _efficiency_ over all else, and there's nothing she could do except let the room close in around her. Then the hand leaves, and the air returns, and she's a gasping, wet, fitful mess. Venom leers down at her, tongue a dangling red blur at the edges of her returning vision, drooling warm notes onto her chin and throat. His hand returns to her hair and starts to caress her scalp. The kind of impromptu massage of a lover after a hard day.

He said he hadn't forgotten it. That... _peek_ through the glass that Wednesday afternoon she shouldn't have seen and only did out a desperation to start righting her wrongs. That desire to connect ended up far deeper than she could've imagined, almost made sense of this entire debacle, and they...hadn't forgotten. The way Eddie groaned in the black mass like he was being cradled in a lover's hand...or the symbiote's volatile, almost _sultry_ egging. Viola sits up, so impulsively she Venom stiffens in surprise, and presses her lips against the slick side of his mouth, where the skin starts to fold back from teeth. Venom's breath isn't a methodical hum now. It's hoarse, as ragged as if he was aching with stress. Whatever shreds of Eddie are left must barely be holding on.

Venom lowers into a crouch, body drowning out the light, to straddle her hips. Viola grunts with the pressure, chest tightening when he drapes over her in a curtain of black. He's _heavy_. He grabs her thigh, shoves it to the side and pushes inside her.

" _We are still a man...underneath all this_." She cries out as he leans in as deep as he can go. " _Oh, **wretched** humanity-_ "

There's no build-up. No momentum to fall into. One second she's wet and aching and _empty_ , the next the world is dizzy and hot. He fucks her like an animal, except he _is_ , and she can't catch up. He's too large, too thick, painfully so. This is just another means of punishing her, she thinks distantly as her fingers grope along the inky skin, struggle to grip, too slippery and alien, and bites her lip hard enough to draw blood as he pounds with cruel single-mindedness.

" _Will you dream of us?_ " He laps the blood from her mouth, smears it across her chin. " _Moan **filth** into your pillow when he fails to satisfy you-_ "

He's too big to wrap her legs around properly, though she tries and tries with increasingly sloppy attempts. She's grown so wet she's dripping, and it's not just that blessed detail that has her body finally, _mercifully_ stretching enough to take the edge off the pain and make each thrust hit a startling note of _right_ and _wrong_. Venom feels the difference, because he lets out a groan that's anything _but_ human and sinks down. Her cheek grinds against the cold floor as she goes from jerking up and down the floor to hardly budging beneath his bulk. She barely has the breath now, pain and pleasure bundled inside her in an agonizing knot, impossible to separate, just like-

" _...us..._ " He's panting in her ear, thrusts too fast and aggressive for her to latch on to any sort of rhythm. " _-Eddie argues your case again, that we should take you for us, tear apart any who even looked twice at you-_ "

Eddie is speaking? She doesn't know what to make of that, couldn't even respond if she wanted to. Venom shifts a little, settling over her more comfortably in a scarily human affect, heated chuckle trembling into her chest-

" _He's so fucked in the head for you._ "

Pressure builds deep in the pit of her stomach, as savage as a splint and a thousand times worse, and Viola whimpers and throws her head back uselessly. Normally she can't come like this, but this is far from _normal_ , and the tiny shivers knotting up inside her are unmistakable. She tries again to curl her leg over the broad slope of Venom's back, desperate to reach the peak-

" _There you go, Viola, there you go-_ " He doesn't sweat, but her skin is almost as slippery as his now- " _Leak for us_ -"

She begs him not to pull out, breaking her silence because she needs this, she's needed it for _weeks_. Her punishment is that tongue slithering back into her mouth and right down her neck, wet enough to push in without trouble and thick enough to cut off her air, and she's suddenly _coming_ , orgasm seizing her thighs tight and making the room's walls pop into white. Viola's nails burrow into the slippery skin as Venom groans in a voice too distorted. His hips twist in shallow jerks as he indulges in the helpless clutch of her body, fucking her throat as he comes, an unmistakable heat spreading deep.

When Venom slides out of her -- once, then twice -- all she can do is stare at the ceiling in a muggy haze, body throbbing with warm, damp exhaustion. It's been a long time since she's felt this clear-headed. When Viola shifts, more a breath than actual movement, something heavy bumps against her thighs. She shifts again, clenching involuntarily when a wet, familiar trickle oozes out. The alien's gliding a slow hand between her legs, feeling along the aftermath with a deliberateness that almost feels smug. Claws trace over the goosebumps popping out through the cold sweat to leave more in their wake.

" _We told you not to speak..._ "

She can just make out the white smear on his fingers as he pulls back. Venom licks it off claws, his knuckles, then leans in again and sighs a hot, wet breath against her skin. Viola clenches her teeth and tries not to whimper as he flicks his tongue along the hypersensitive, tender flesh. Lapping up her wetness, mingled with his release. When he's finished a stray streak of pink sticks to her inner thigh.

" _...But you wouldn't be nearly as good a fuck without your limbs, so we'll overlook it just this once. Maybe we'll dream of this, too, on our journey to navigate the dreck of this world. Maybe recreate it when the unloneliness is too much to bear and Eddie craves a familiar pocket of flesh_..." A chasm of teeth, laughing at it all. " _We can't **wait** for the planet to bleed_."

His voice is soothing now. Drunk. Deeper than even her heartbeat, now sluggishly thumping against her chest after a beautiful rush of adrenaline and endorphins. Her hair is a scattered mess, sticking to her neck in half-dried loops. Venom moves slowly, almost lazily, and nuzzles the front of his mouth against her hair. When he indulges in a long, content yawn that shows every last tooth in his mouth a muscle in his thick neck pops.

" _First things first._ "

Venom presses the tip of one claw into her arm and _drags_ , just light enough not to deeply puncture and just hard enough to draw blood. Viola hardly has a mind for the pain, doing little more than wince as he starts the torture he's had planned all along. The floor disappears, her body pressed against a broad, black expanse, and she watches the hallway vanish from sight. ...Oh, what has she just _done?_ Her pity, her fucked-up _lust_ has unleashed a creature of terrifying violence on the world and people she was trying to help. She doesn't even know what happened to the rest of the facility. The truth batters around in the back of her mind, defined by distant screams and sudden silences.

It's only the sudden chill of open air that jogs her from them. She's not being tortured, gutted or eaten. She's...being carried outside.

Viola has hardly looked up before she's being set down on the cold grass patch that stretches up and around the facility's mundane gray walls, her torn jacket around her shoulders and skirt back around her hip. It's evening, the sky's warm peach almost otherworldly after the LUX Programme's abrupt closure. The last minutes on the clock, looking down at the flashing lights and lone alarm still blaring all the way down the slope. When she shifts up into a sitting position and turns around Venom is gone.

" _Eddie is ours and so are you_." A whisper bids beyond the trees. " _Enjoy your broken world, doctor_."

\--

"Do you think the alien could have somehow grown attached to you after all these meetings? Is that why you're here and not on a missing poster?"

"I don't know."

"Did it speak when you saw it? Say _anything_ at all?"

"I'm not sure I remember."

"Christ alive..."

Matthew sighs and huffs and rubs his throat. His assistant has walked back inside to stand next to him. The new schedule of these few hours is _click-clack_ ing to a close.

"I'll be honest...there are still some gaps in the story I don't quite like. It's not your fault, though. You're stressed, tired, a lot's happened. We'll be revisiting this in later weeks once you've bounced back." He holds up a hand and ticks off each finger in a severe, ordinary little way. "We still have no idea who could've gotten access to these passwords or messed with the security camera feed. With Carlton Drake missing it's more than possible he tried to take all this information with him. Again, it's just a theory, but."

She wonders if she has Eddie Brock to thank for that. The symbiote and its destruction, maybe, if it had been intentional at all. Then the exhaustion finally sinks in and she stops thinking overmuch. Viola vaguely considers the distance of the near future. The following day. The week after. Then the month after that. Who knew what the new calendar of her life was going to look like? Matthew's assistant hands him his cellphone and tells him of someone important waiting on the other line. Viola waits for the man to get to his feet and leave the room, then glances down at the fresh scar on her upper left arm.

A perfect V written in red.

**Author's Note:**

> Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday...I'm in lo-
> 
> I don't think Venom would be a huge fan of The Cure. Then again, I could be completely, _utterly_ wrong and British pop is his actually favorite thing besides chocolate.
> 
> So, I wrote this down _months_ before the movie came out because the trailers alone were juicy as hell, and that ended up being a great span of time to step away from the fic and come back to it with fresh eyes. Time to post this and give all you monster fuckers something to munch on so I can move the fuck on to my dozen and a half other half-finished projects. Can I also mentioned how tickled I am this fic had a minor gag about Red Lobster and one of the movie's most well-known jokes is Eddie dunking his ass into a lobster tank? I swear to God that wasn't a last-minute edit. I just think that restaurant's shit.  
>     
> while I saw the movie the other day, I'm noticing I still took more inspiration from annihilation and shape of water hmmmmm


End file.
